First published: 1974, Holland
Original Language: Dutch
Topics: World War II, Nazi occupation, persecution of Jews, coming of age, family
In A Nutshell: Unlike most books I've read in my life, this is not a book that was, as far as I know, ever intended to be read by anyone else, much less as a story. What plot it has is a combination of the drama of World War II from 1942 to 1944 and the everyday trials and joys of a young Jewish girl living in hiding in Amsterdam from her thirteenth to fifteenth year. The diary chronicles the events beginning with Anne's thirteenth birthday, when she receives the diary, shortly after which she and her family are forced by the escalating persecution of the Jews in German-occupied Holland to go into hiding into a secret annex in a warehouse. The Frank family--father Otto, mother Edith, sister Margot, and Anne--are joined by the Van Daan family--father Hermann, mother Auguste, and son Peter--and later by a dentist, Mr. Dussel. Anne writes about her squabbles with her companions, her eventual companionship with and love for Peter, her growing sexuality and self-awareness as a woman, her concerns about the war, her ideals, her personality, her everyday life. The book ends suddenly, the last entry three days before the group was betrayed, arrested, and deported.
Thinking Makes It So: Anne's diary was a very odd experience, for a number of reasons. First, I felt vaguely guilty about reading it, especially the very intimate and personal parts; it was like listening in on someone else's thoughts when they weren't aware of it.
There was also a palpable sense of impending doom and a horrible sadness about it. Of course, I already know how all of this is going to end for Anne; but, irrepressible as always, Anne dreams on about life after the war, about going back to school, about falling in love and growing up and becoming a journalist. I wanted to shout through the pages to warn her. And after having read the innermost thoughts and feelings of this young girl, removed from me by time and space, circumstance and language, I felt like I knew her, in a way, like she was confiding in me. I think we could've been friends.
Which makes it all the more painful when I turned the page and the last entry on August 1st, 1944, ended, and only the afterword carried on from there. You see, if I'm going to be honest, I have to say that I get rather frustrated with all the World War II literature that comes out of Germany. It's like since the war, nothing has been produced literature-wise by Germany that doesn't deal with either the war or the aftermath of the war. I feel like there's more to Germany than that--more than the Nazis and the concentration camps and the Berlin Wall. What about those thousands of years of history and culture leading up to the 20th century? And eventually it all just gets depressing, because you know in the end, every time, the hero's going to get deported off and die horribly.
But this was very different. Because up till now, I've only read fiction about this period. For example, Er Hieß Jan also had to do with the war, but those people weren't real; sure, something similar happened to someone like that, somewhere. And yes, it's awful. But it doesn't feel so immediate.
I think, for our own sakes and sanities, we simply can't comprehend a statement like "Six million Jews were exterminated in the Holocaust." It's just too big. It's like the scene in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (I know, it's not terribly appropriate, but occasionally in his silliness Douglas Adams sneaks in some painful truth) where Arthur Dent is trying to comprehend that the Earth has been destroyed and can't do it; his mind simply can't compute the magnitude of the devastation, the multitude of lives lost. He has to narrow it down, focus on a single thing--in Arthur's case, a McDonald's hamburger--to feel the effect. In this case, for me, the scope of the tragedy is also too vast, but by bringing it down to a single person--a single, normal, wonderful girl, so thoroughly and palpably human--sudden the horror and the hideous tragedy are much more immediate. Although Anne's diary ends, of course, before they're discovered, since I now "know" Anne a little better, I can dimly perceive the frantic terror and gut-wrenching despair of being discovered, see the concentration camp through her eyes. It takes the cruelty to and mass slaughter of millions of people, too vast to imagine, and narrows it down to one family, one girl, whose hopes of a normal, happy life ended in disease and death just months before freedom would come.
That You Must Teach Me: Excerpts from the diary would be very authentic (how much more authentic could you get?) descriptions of life in hiding during the war. The book, seeing as how it covers two years, is rather long, with many minute details, so some entries could be more useful than others. Possible uses:
- Illustrating life and social structure in occupied Holland
- Defining human rights and equality
- Analyzing moral issues: corrupt government vs. rebels, black market, protecting the innocent
- Exploring coming-of-age issues, teenage concerns, the common struggles of becoming an adult
Resources:
WebEnglishTeacher: List of links, vocab, discussion questions
TeacherVision: Ideas for activities
EdSITEment: Lesson plan
BookRags: Study guides, notes, lesson plans
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